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New Post 11/23/2007 7:24 AM
User is offline ekareem
5 posts
10th Level Poster


Which approach to use to model Business Process for Business People 

Hi,

I am tasked with creaing a serious set of business processes for a major firm. None of which will be automated from the modeling tool. The target audience are business employees, auditors and may be some developers.

I need to be able to describe processes, pre and post conditions, re-use processes and re-use actors and roles, capture organization structures,...etc.

I can think of 3 different approaches:

1-UML - Too technical, there is a structured way to tie Use Cases to Actors and group use cases but too technical and hard to use for a business person.

2-BPMN - Not as comfortable to use as 3, depending on the tool, hard to give to business people so that they can learn the process from it (I guess).

3-Ad-Hoc flow chart - Cheap and offers ease of use and distribution

So what would you recommend to be the best (and why)?

 
New Post 11/24/2007 5:04 AM
User is offline Adrian M.
764 posts
3rd Level Poster




Re: Which approach to use to model Business Process for Business People 

My suggestion would be to use BPMN.  While BPMN does introduce some new symbols (as compared to a traditional flow-chart) it is by far the best tool for the job.  I have used BPMN to document business processes and presented the process flows to the business stakeholders.  They had not issues understanding the diagrams.

If your stakeholders are new to process modeling then create a quick cheat sheet for them to remind them of what that various BPMN symbols mean.

Hope this helps!

- Adrian


Adrian Marchis
Business Analyst Community Blog - Post your thoughts!
 
New Post 11/24/2007 12:50 PM
User is offline ekareem
5 posts
10th Level Poster


Re: Which approach to use to model Business Process for Business People 

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your reply. I see your point.

I was thinking about the following 2 points...

A - I was wondering if it is possible to show the following on a BPMN diagram:

1-User role

2-Specific For

3-Pre/Post-Condition

B - I have not picked a tool yet, but I was wondering if the tools would normally be smart enough to list all processes using "loan application form" for example?'

Thanks again.

 
New Post 11/30/2007 12:43 PM
User is offline Adrian M.
764 posts
3rd Level Poster




Re: Which approach to use to model Business Process for Business People 

 ekareem wrote

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your reply. I see your point.

I was thinking about the following 2 points...

A - I was wondering if it is possible to show the following on a BPMN diagram:

1-User role

2-Specific For

3-Pre/Post-Condition

B - I have not picked a tool yet, but I was wondering if the tools would normally be smart enough to list all processes using "loan application form" for example?'

Thanks again.

Here it is:

A.1 An easy and often used method of showing user roles in a BPMN diagram is by using swimlanes.  Take a look how Frank used swimlanes in his process flow using the BPMN notation, in this forum thread:

http://www.modernanalyst.com/Community/Forums/tabid/76/forumid/16/threadid/363/scope/posts/Default.aspx

A.2 What do you mean by "Specific For", can you give a bit more details?

A.3 One way I have showed pre- & post-conditions in a process flow/BPMN diagram is by using a callout (text annotation) on the Start symbol (for pre-conditions) and End symbol (for post-conditions).  The text annotation symbol is natively supported by BPMN.   BPMN also supports conditions for transitions between process steps which you can use to depict pre-conditions which must be true in order to start the next step.

B I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "loan application form"... is this supposed to be a step/task in a process, a sub-process, an input to the process, etc.?  The features available vary from tool to tool but many of them support reusability of tasks and sub-processes so that you can find out all the processes which contain a given task or sub-process.  Also BPMN supports the concept of a Data Object (which the loan application form sounds like) and many tools have support for the ability to show you all the places where a given data object is being created or consumed by a step in the process.

- Adrian


Adrian Marchis
Business Analyst Community Blog - Post your thoughts!
 
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